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Sid begins to wash one paw with the calm of a creature who has just ruined a man's night and intends to sleep well.

"You've been able to do that the whole time?"

Nothing.

"You let me feed you salmon for two weeks and you could talk?"

He yawns. Then, mild as weather:

Household staff. What a nuisance.

I take the stairs two at a time and shut my own door like it's the cat's fault.

The shower runs on the other side of my wall for eleven minutes.

I know because I count them. Pipe knock, the old ones in the guest bath, then quiet, then the floor giving under her feet, then the click of the lamp. She turns over twice. The bed frame is oak and honest and tells me everything.

I lie in the dark in the house I built out for a family I never had and I want her so badly my hands ache.

Ours. Go.

No.

She left the light on.

She left the light on because a shadow creature came through her front door in daylight.

My wolf doesn't care about the reasons. He never has. He's been throwing himself at the inside of my skin since April, since a woman tried to ram my mailbox and every night since I have told him the same thing.

Not until she chooses it.

Not until she knows what she's choosing.

I put my forearm over my eyes and think of today instead. Her hands on my burned arm this morning, the way she checked it before she checked herself. Her mouth. The half second in the kitchen when the cabinets stopped slamming because I got close enough that her magic went quiet. Neither of us said a word about what that meant.

Down the hall the lamp clicks off. And, somewhere in this house a cat and a wolf are judging me. Nothing's changed.

I lie there and think about my depressed mother and my father telling me she got used to the bond when she obviously never did.

That's the alternative. That's what's on the other side of taking what I want one sided.

It matters to me that I don't claim her without asking. That's a line that I’m determined to hold

I'd rather want her forever.

The first ward goes at 1:40.

It doesn't break. That's the thing I'll tell Evelyn in the morning, when I can say it without wrecking the phone. It doesn't break, it closes, the way a hand closes. The pressure at the northeast corner of the property folds in on itself and goes flat, and I'm out of bed before I've finished waking up.

Second one. The maple line.

Third.

Threat. Threat. Now.

I go down the stairs in the dark, fast and silent, and the cold hits me at the bottom. Frost on the inside of the kitchen glass, growing while I watch it, feathering out from the corners in a pattern I don't like.

Sid is on the sill. Not arched. Not hissing.